Updates: Joys and Frustrations

While i've been behind on the daily log, my thoughts have been with you, o electronic canvas...

On Wednesday, more conversation and thought spent on the face of the American Community College. In class, we analyzed the journals of Wick Sloan, a Bunker Hill C.C. writing professor posted on Inside Higher Ed, and experienced the passion of a committed, engaged teacher. Through his writings, one feels the different classroom culture that C.C.'s attract and, (sorry for the word), cultivate. Check it out; here's one article to wet your whistle (http://www.insidehighered.com/views/sloane/sloane13).

Thursday was a great day...a fellow teacher and I took a couple students to the Nationals game. A couple months ago, these students won a raffle where this particular prize was to accompany me to a ballgame; they lucked out. We caught an afternoon against the Reds, which, at first, provided some doubts of whether or not we'd get a show, but once we arrived I had the feeling we picked a winner.
For one of the boys, this was his first ballgame and he arrived wide-eyed and enthusiastic; the other was eight hours into celebrating his sixteenth birthday. After arriving and paying for our $5 "day-of-game" tickets (of which there were probably hundreds still available), we immediately found different, more expensive seats to casually plop into. With the Left Field foul poll five rows away, we caught the first inning from the outfield bleachers. By the third inning, we found ourselves about a dozen rows away from Third Base where, randomly, we were invited by a Nats employee to punch out 250 All Star Ballots by hand; if successfully accomplished by the 6th inning, we won a prize. Needless to say, the four of us grabbed some pencils and starting plugging away, five ballots at a time. Our prize (after some convincing) included three t-shrits and a ball cap; the boys inherited all of it.
Innings later, the Nats went ahead in the bottom of the 8th, the boys talked to the grounds crew members, were posted on the "JumboTron", grabbed a game ball from the dugout, and consumed bags upon bags of peanuts...all from vacant section along the First Base side of Nats Park. No rain, no problems, and all left witnessing a rare accomplishment: a Nationals victory.

Last night (Friday), my first class of "Anthropology of Education" met to complain, confuse, and frustrate the 24 adult learners trying to learn how to establish and utilize the virtual classroom software required for the course. Again, as one of two men in the course (third time in five classes), it was amazing to see how the majority of the people were technologically illiterate. It took an hour and 45 minutes to complete a 20-minute exericise, and was simply hilarious. After the smoke cleared and folks took a quick break, we did have a good ice-breaker discussion on worldviews and culture. There's potential...